RESEARCH ESSAY

Research Essay



Research Essay

Introduction

Both Britain and the US are committed to social and ethnic equality. But how much ethnic disadvantage is there in the two countries? Do minority ethnic groups fare better in one country than in the other? Is there any progress over time? This paper examines the employment status and the class position of minority ethnic groups in the two countries using micro-data from the two most recent Censuses of the Population. The analysis shows that most people from minority ethnic origins in the two countries were heavily disadvantaged both in employment and in access to professional managerial (salariat) positions. For comparable minority ethnic groups, people in the US fared better than their British counterparts but the latter, especially the second-generation, were found as making more progress over time. There was greater ethnic polarisation in the US than in Britain, with some groups remaining persistently disadvantaged but others outperforming Whites. Overall, while some signs of improvement are visible, persistent ethnic disadvantages are the defining feature of the social structure in both countries. Much more needs to be done to ensure social-ethnic equality.

WHY IS IT THAT BRITAIN'S MINORITY AND MAJORITY POPULATIONS CONTINUE TO OCCUPY VERY DIFFERENT POSITIONS IN THE LABOUR MARKET?

The United States of America and Great Britain are generally regarded as the genotype of liberal capitalism. Even so, the US is often portrayed, from popular myths to sociological representations, as a land of opportunity while Britain is perceived as being hopelessly hampered by entrenched class inequality and social sclerosis. To date, the most influential cross-national research on the two countries has focused on class inequalities, with relatively little attention to ethnicity (Erikson and Goldthorpe, 1985, 1992; Kerckhoff et al., 1985; though see Cheng, 1994; Model, 2005).

However, within each country, a huge amount of research has been conducted on the socioeconomic situation of the minority ethnic groups. The US is a typical immigrant society with over two hundred years of immigration history whereas successive waves of immigrants arrived in Britain only after the end of the Second World War. The different historical contexts and source countries of immigration entail different compositions and different experiences of the minority ethnic groups in the two countries. Existing research has shown that minority white groups from the southern or eastern Europe to the US or from the Old Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland to the UK became integrated into the socio-economic cultural fabric of the host society fairly quickly, often within one or two generations (Alba, 2005; Waters, 2008; Li and Heath, 2008, 2009). In each country, the visible minority ethnic groups, namely, non-whites are often shown to suffer varying degrees of racial discrimination and various kinds of disadvantages (Daniel, 1968; Jowell and Prescott-Clarke, 1970; Stewart, 1983; Telles and Murguia, 1990; Quillian, 2006). There are only a few comparative studies on ethnic relations in the two countries and they tend to be limited in scope, such as on inter-ethnic marriages between blacks and whites in New York and London (Model and ...